Its leader is the steward of our public lands and waters, guardian of our natural heritage, and keeper of our national story. The department plays a vital role in furthering our understanding of science and promoting that knowledge to advance the manifest national interest we share in widening our grasp of what’s happening in our natural world. And decisions made and actions taken by this important department exert broad influence, for better or worse, on national efforts to fight the growing dangers of climate change and the rising toll it is taking on the lives of Americans.

To head this agency and its 70,000 devoted public servants is a high honor. It calls for leadership we all can view as honorable.

Unfortunately, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has failed to provide that kind of leadership. He’s failed at, and even worked to thwart, the department’s most fundamental mission—to safeguard public waters and lands. And he’s failed to meet the standards for ethics and common decency expected of any cabinet member charged with representing the best interests of the American people.

The Interior Department oversees roughly one-third of the country’s land area through its management of wilderness tracts, underground mineral resources, and more than 400 national parks, nearly 600 national wildlife refuges, and more than 100 national monuments. The Statue of Liberty. The Grand Canyon. Yellowstone National Park. The Lincoln Memorial. The Canyons of the Ancients. These special places, and many more—places we’ve protected to preserve our natural heritage or to situate the American story on the American landscape—are entrusted to the Interior Department’s care.

The Interior oversees hundreds of millions of acres of wilderness, from the Petrified Forest of Arizona to the great Atchafalaya river basin swamp. And it has authority over oil and gas drilling in federal waters—ocean waters three miles beyond our shores.

Presiding over these lands and waters, their use and all they support, is a solemn obligation. Generations of Americans have protected these lands and waters and were committed to their safekeeping, so that future generations might know the natural splendor of this country much as the first Americans experienced it. That’s been a core national value for Republicans and Democrats alike for more than a century. For any Interior secretary, it’s job one.

Zinke has rolled back essential safeguards put in place to reduce the risk of one of the most hazardous industrial operations on earth: offshore oil and gas drilling. The protections Zinke has eviscerated embodied the lessons we learned, as a nation, from the 2010 BP blowout that killed 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon, dumped millions of barrels of toxic crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and threw tens of thousands out of work for months. Weakening those commonsense safeguards to cut industry costs puts our workers, waters, and wildlife at needless risk. It’s beyond irresponsible. It’s nothing short of madness.

Handing our oceans, marine life, coastal communities, and all they support over to the destruction and danger of the offshore oil and gas industry flies in the face of concerted opposition to offshore drilling by tens of thousands of citizens, business owners, fishermen, governors, mayors and others up and down the entire East Coast. And for what? The fossil fuel industry itself says what little oil and gas may lie beneath Atlantic waters won’t be available for another 25 or 30 years. By then, we’ll need to have cut fossil fuel consumption, not expanded it, or we’ll cede vast portions of our country and our economy to the ravages of worsening climate change. So says the new National Climate Assessment, the work of top scientists and other experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, the Pentagon, and 10 other federal agencies—including the Department of the Interior itself.

America’s public waters and lands belong to you and me. Zinke’s record as a steward of that public trust has been, in a word, abysmal.

In addition, he’s brought a level of personal comportment to the job that runs from high-handed to disgraceful: ordering staff to hoist a flag atop Interior Department headquarters whenever Zinke graces the building, becoming the subject of some 17 official inquiries into alleged ethics violations, casually calling for investigations into public interest groups that dare to question his imperious ways, poking a finger in the face of a young woman who deigned to ask why he wasn’t listening to tribal leaders calling for the preservation of needed protections at Bears Ears.

Ryan Zinke is a failed Interior secretary. He’s failing the country. It’s time for him to go.